"This critter is out of his mind with power .If this keeps up America will be gone by Christmas !"

Lawrence Summers

About the same time that President Obama was at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, pitching the benefits of a health care overhaul, one of his top economic advisers was fielding questions about what might come next.

Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National EconomicCouncil, told a conference of economists in Washington on Tuesday that President Obama would probably start addressing the needs of Social Security before the end of his term.

“Over the course of the president’s term, the president will, I am confident, address Social Security,” Mr. Summers said in a response to a question at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Mr. Summers said the top priority in overhauling Social Security would be to make sure that people could rely on their benefits. President Bush tried and failed to overhaul Social Security, in part by letting people divert some of their payroll taxes into individual retirement accounts and by scaling back the growth in future benefits.

Mr. Summers seemed intent on signaling that Mr. Obama’s idea of “reform” would be to strengthen the program rather rather than to partly privatize it.

But Mr. Summers said the big cost problems for the government are in health care. Reducing the growth of Medicare costs by just a few tenths of a percent per year, he said, would over a period of decades save enough money to fill the projected shortfall for Social Security

But Mr. Summers said the big cost problems for the government are in health care. Reducing the growth of Medicare costs by just a few tenths of a percent per year, he said, would over a period of decades save enough money to fill the projected shortfall for Social Security